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comment by veen
veen  ·  3055 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The $75,000 problem for self-driving cars is going away

Not at all the same thing. Subaru has an entirely different system with an entirely different purpose: assistance instead of full control, meaning it can do with a cheap sub-$1000 intelligent camera.

The kind of LIDAR that Google needed -the one on their Lexuses and Priuses - was the $75k Velodyne. They're now working with a sub-10k model, I think. While I don't think it is a hurdle to the development of self-driving cars, it is definitely necessary to develop better and cheaper models. There's a reason they haven't announced the specs of the budget lasers yet because that's when people will likely become sceptical. You really do need a high level of precision, quality assurance and speed for full control, none of which is cheap at the moment but inevitably will be.





user-inactivated  ·  3055 days ago  ·  link  ·  

The interesting thing is that reading about the LIDAR-on-a-chip is how do thousands of cars keep who's radar is who's? You'd have to put a serial number in the beam somehow, which means that you can put a detector on the street and track vehicles very easily.

10 years is three machine generations. I have no doubt that by the time these cars are ready, the production demands will drop the price per unit much like CPU prices have plunged. If they can make a $5 Raspberry Pi, they can find a way to do cheap LIDAR using the steel/aluminum in the car as the antenna.

The thing is that what seems improbable now only needs time talent and money to make commonplace. In 12-14 years when it is time for me to buy a new car, I don't doubt that this tech will be an option.